[bradford]

> .NET had/has a higher cost to entry

> It is arguably also a bad business decision to shell out $$ for a language that isn't used at your company.

What cost(s) are you thinking of here? .NET doesn't cost anything (monetarily). Some of the tools cost money but you can also get by in the .NET world with a command-prompt and text editor (I did as a hobbyist for quite some time).

I might be misunderstanding your statements, but it's also possible that you're misunderstanding .NET, I'm just trying to clarify which one it :)

[oblio]

For a long time many third party components were commercial. A lot more than in the Ruby, Python or Java ecosystems, for example.

Things are slowly moving towards Open Source and cross platform, but .NET is far behind Java at this moment. It is moving fast, though.

[wutwutwutwut]

I've been doing .NET development since 2006 and have never had to buy commercial components. Every time I have needed something there has been free/open source stuff. I'm guessing it depends on what type of software you are working on?

[sbergot]

For a long time there was no free option to validate json schema with the latest norm.

[recentdarkness]

One needs to invest $$ because you pay money for the developers time to create software

[perfectstorm]

> but .NET had/has a higher cost to entry (higher than say, ruby/py/java)

as opposed to Java developers who are hmm...free ?